It's a largely unknown, untold story. I'm fond of saying that my
organization had its roots with the Mutualista Movement, the
Mutual Aid Society movement in the 1800's; the mid- 1800's. This
was a struggle to protect ourselves against a lot of injustices and
lots of discrimination. First, all over the Southwest and the
Midwest; some of those groups still exist. I, personally, was
impacted by those kinds of organizations. They formed the framework
for a lot of civil rights activities. Also, I often site the fact
that there were a lot of killings of our community that have
largely been untold. In my own state of Texas, some, perhaps as
many as 5,000 of our folks were killed during a period in this
century - in this past century, in the early 1900's, that goes
largely unnoticed and unreported. The fact that, perhaps as many as
one million of our folks were illegally deported back to Mexico or
to other places of origin during the Great Depression; that's
another story that's largely unknown. And in our legal civil
rights, we had great lawyers, who went to the Supreme Court in the
late 40's and then early 50's to win civil rights and to
desegregate our schools, and much of what they did formed the basis
for Brown v. The Board of Education, in 1954; the Supreme Court
decision which launched a great civil rights movement. That's a
story that, unfortunately, we don't have time to go into in any
great detail, but its largely unknown by the American people, and,
indeed, by our own community.